We've got over 50 years experience with spinning disk in all kinds of conditions, ranging from notebooks to massive big iron arrays. SSDs, not so much. And boy, do we have a lot to learn.
Despite billions spent on backup power batteries and generators, power failures at major data centers are not uncommon - just ask Netflix - so this is a real issue. Given proprietary Flash Translation Layers (FTL), there's no easy way to understand SSD behavior without testing.
In Understanding the Robustness of SSDs under Power Fault, (pdf) researchers Mai Zheng and Feng Qin of Ohio State and Mark Lillibridge and Joseph Tucek of HP Labs look at how power faults affect flash-based SSDs. Short answer: it's not pretty.
The research The team developed hardware to inject power faults and software to stress devices and check post-fault consistency. These were used to check 15 different SSDs and 2 hard drives.
The authors looked for several types of errors, including bit corruption, shorn writes, metadata corruption and dead (bricked) devices. Write data was configured to enable detection of these and other errors.
